There’s even a fake prize dedicated to mocking such studies: the “Ig Nobel,” which the aforementioned mosquito story won several years back.

But the knowledge we gained from those cheese-smitten blood-suckers served as the basis for research that now indicates that “malaria-carrying mosquitoes are more attracted to the smell of human flesh than healthy mosquitoes,” which could be vital information to the prevention of widespread illness and death. Science, you rascal!

Related Posts:

• Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean
• Field Trip to the Earthquake Lab, 2010
• Reminder of the Importance of NASA
• Tracking Quakes
• The Blame Game

You get one of the biggest con jobs in academic history.

The New York Times Magazine profiles Diederik Stapel, whose experiments on behavioral issues like racism and greed were completely faked.

Related Posts:

• Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
• Ultrarunning, Ultrawriting
• Happy Baby Shoutout!
• Field Trip to the Earthquake Lab, 2010
• Reminder of the Importance of NASA

The truth is there’s not much to see. But beneath the surface Parkfield is constantly rumbling with earthquakes, little ones all the time and bigger ones hitting more than most people would care to experience. Though it may not have the greatest quantity of earthquakes, it has perhaps had the greatest number of quality earthquakes—somewhat predictable big quakes that can be scientifically studied. Parkfield is probably the most mapped and measured spot along the notorious 800 mile long San Andreas Fault.

The San Andreas is a transform, or strike-slip fault defined by movement of the North American and Pacific plates as they grind against each other. The Pacific plate moves roughly northward while the North American plate drifts southward. Every now and then this slow tense grind lets loose with a dramatic slip and an earthquake occurs. The Grand Tejon quake of 1857, a truly massive 8+magnitude temblor, locked up the Parkfield section of the fault, creating a zone of nearly constant grinding seismicity. Beginning in the late 60’s and early 70’s the USGS set up shop in Parkfield, rigging the landscape with a vast net of seismometers, tilt meters, gas sniffers, cameras, and more recently GPS and satellite technology, all in an effort to “capture” a 6+ magnitude earthquake.

“Capture” suggests an effort akin to catching lightning in a bottle, an attempt at harnessing chaos; and the plan was to “capture” as in frame, freeze like a photograph, a specimen to be studied, dissected and mapped, as if they were neuroscientists charting the brain-waves and behavior of their most cherished and confounding patient, this eternally seizing epileptic planet we call home.

The plan, dubbed the Parkfield Experiment, was to wait for a big quake to hit the region–something that seemed fairly easy to predict based on the abundance of seismic activity in the valley–and to use their monitoring equipment to record every aspect of its behavior, thereby providing the USGS with a comprehensive map of the quake’s personality. They wanted to see all the foreshocks, fissures, P-waves, S-waves, amplitudes and aftershocks. The plan, to some people, was ambitious, and perhaps a bit crazy. The plan was to capture a quake that would allow an unprecedented picture of an earthquake and provide the kind of data that could refine the admittedly rudimentary science of earthquake prediction. The plan was not to cause an earthquake. The USGS would tell you that this is nearly impossible. They would tell you that humans are just too insignificant to affect the seismicity of our planet.

***

In the summer of 2010 the USGS office in Parkfield was housed in a brown singlewide mobile home parked next to the Cal-Fire station, not far from the Parkfield Café and the Parkfield Inn. I drove down one morning from my home in seismically silent, Fresno for a meeting with Andy Snyder, the man largely responsible for supervising the Parkfield experiment for the last six years. By the time Snyder arrived in in the Cholame Valley in 2004 for an ambitious new phase of the Parkfield Experiment, the USGS had been waiting almost forty years to capture their ultimate target earthquake, a big 6+-magnitude rumbler. It had been a long wait, so long in fact that priorities had begun to shift, methods had begun to change. Andy Snyder was the man charged with supervising these new priorities and new methods. No longer satisfied just sitting around waiting for a big quake, the USGS had decided to go after them where they lived.

When I met Snyder, he drove a black Mazda Miata with a vanity plate that read, “EQHAZRD,” which he parked beneath the shade of a small carport just steps away from the narrow brown modular trailer where he spent much of an average day staring at a computer, monitoring the vast array of sensing equipment spread around the Cholame Valley. Snyder watched it all, but paid special attention to data coming in from his pet, his baby, a truly monumental undertaking that defined the new priorities in Parkfield, something called the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, or more colloquially, SAFOD.

Snyder was neither tall nor short and with his sandy blond hair, ruddy complexion and blue jeans looked like he’d be comfortable parked at a beachfront bar or hitting golf balls on Sundays. Snyder didn’t live in Parkfield, couldn’t live here, he told me. Instead he commuted from San Luis Obispo, and liked it that way because the town had things like restaurants, grocery stores, farmer’s markets, wine-bars, movie theatres and art galleries.

“It has culture,” he said with an audible wink.

Snyder took over in Parkfield after working in the oil and gas industry in what he called, “exploration.” Snyder wasn’t a geophysicist. He was a driller, oil mostly. He was an engineer, not a scientist. That’s why the USGS brought him here to supervise SAFOD, a massive drilling effort funded at least in part by the National Science Foundation. The ambitious goal of the project was to drill a three-foot diameter shaft directly into the San Andreas fault itself, and to not only monitor seismic activity as close to the source as possible but also to bring back core rock samples from the fault for scientific study. The plan was to go after earthquakes in their nest, to study them at the source.

If you’re like me, when you hear about something called the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, then you dwell on that word “observatory,” and imagine yourself in a sealed-off glass enclosure descending into the earth on some kind of funicular track with a tour guide in a uniform. You imagine yourself staring into a chasm or cross section of rock that reveals the San Andreas Fault in action. You hear “observatory” and expect a tour guide’s measured delivery of facts mixed in with the pull of human-interest stories, and you begin to believe that you’re in for some kind of hands-on experience where you engage with the shifting landscapes of geological time in meaningful and significant ways. You might even expect to buy a t-shirt in the gift shop.

This is not SAFOD.

Snyder had tried to warn me. In a tersely worded email he said Parkfield wasn’t what he’d call a “science travel” destination. [1]

When I asked him that day if I could visit SAFOD he looked at me like I was stupid, paused and said, “It’s just a shack and a slag pit.”

“Um, OK,” I said, nervously rubbing my hands on my knees. My dreams of seeing the San Andreas died with a whimper.

Snyder swiveled back and forth in his desk chair and then kept talking. “Right now we’re dealing with the problem of what to do with all the stuff we took out.”

I admit I was disappointed there was nothing to see, nothing to visit. SAFOD, I learned, was a monumental project with no monument, an observatory hidden away on an isolated section of the San Andreas on private property, totally inaccessible to the public. The only thing you could really observe from SAFOD was sensor readout on Andy Snyder’s computer.

I’d come to Parkfield hoping to see the San Andreas, perhaps to feel something big like an earthquake. But I’d expected too much.

“The fault itself is only a couple of inches wide in some places,” Snyder told me, holding up his fingers to show me the gap. “It’s surrounded by looser material, but the crack itself isn’t much at all.”

“Really?”

“Sure, but ‘s 10 miles deep and 800 miles long.”

“Ten miles deep?”

“Maybe more.”

That’s 52,800 feet, or nearly 25,000 feet higher than the tallest mountains on the planet and 20,000 feet higher than the altitude at which passenger jets fly. Snyder showed me giant educational poster boards that stretched nearly from one side of the trailer to the other and illustrated in bright colors how the SAFOD drill-rig punched it’s three-foot and descending diameter shaft three miles, or almost 16,000 feet down into the earth’s crust, bending at forty-five degrees right before plunging straight into the San Andreas Fault itself like a needle taking a biopsy.

I asked Snyder if the USGS worried about the danger, the potential seismic impact of drilling a hole that wide and deep into the most active fault zone in North America.

“Sure, we thought about that,” Snyder said, “but it’s the equivalent of sticking a push-pin into that wall.”

He pointed to the wall of his trailer, chuckled, and returned to his giant posters.

I laughed, too, but I was still staring at the wall and thinking: inches wide and miles deep.  I was thinking about hundreds or thousands of pushpins shoved into a crack in the wall. I imagined the biggest push-pin in the world, a huge cartoonish red thing plunging into a fragile egg laced with cracks and fissures covering a boiling core, a shell that floats around on that center, moving on a geological clock, apparently independent and inconsiderate to the efforts of human survival. Or maybe not. Maybe human life and the life of our planet are more intimately connected than we truly understand. Maybe when we poke and prod, drill and blast into the earth, we unleash consequences we can’t predict.

 ***

Soon after drilling at SAFOD was coming to an end in 2004, just as they were settling into the next monitoring phase of the Parkfield Experiment, at 10:15 in the morning of September 28, a magnitude 6 earthquake rippled up from nearly 5 miles beneath the surface and rumbled through the valley, the biggest Parkfield earthquake in nearly 40 years. As the USGS watched and listened, the quake shook long enough (nearly 10 seconds) and hard enough to become the most “captured” quake in the history of the Parkfield Experiment.

It was kind of a big deal. A resounding success. But few people outside of Parkfield or the somewhat insular community of seismologists and earthquake obsessives knew much about it. Nobody was killed or injured. There was a little property damage. Life in the Cholame Valley proceeded mostly uninterrupted, just as it always does.

When I visited some six years later with geophysicists, Andy Michael and Diane Moore at the USGS Western Regional Headquarters in Menlo Park, California, I asked again if anyone living in the Cholame Valley in 2004 had raised concerns about the drilling at SAFOD and the 2004 Parkfield quake. I was basically asking if anyone blamed them for causing the quake they were happily studying.

We stood in a hallway staring at brightly colored posters on SAFOD. The USGS likes posters and maps, and I’d already spent a delirious few minutes collecting maps and other documents from their sales department before wandering around gawking at the poster and map-filled walls of the building. The halls were like a gallery of seismic art.

Moore, a woman who exuded the calm wisdom of a veteran high school science teacher, was the first to respond to my question. “What are there like 20 people living in Parkfield?” she asked. “We’d probably get more complaints from cows.”

She chuckled a bit and smiled at me.

“Yeah, right,” Michael interjected, “but think about the difference if SAFOD was in a major metropolitan area? Think of the impact on public perception.”

“Sure, like if we’d drilled into the Hayward fault?” Moore asked and shook her head. She suddenly looked like she was giving me bad news about my grade in her class.

We all stared at the poster. And I understood what they were saying. If SAFOD was drilled in the Bay Area, underneath Oakland or Berkeley, along the Hayward Fault, then the 2004 quake could have triggered an unwanted ripple-effect reaction from the public. People might believe—against all “objective” evidence to the contrary–that the USGS had caused the quake by drilling into the fault zone.

The resulting waves of fear and panic could endanger the very existence of seismology as a legitimate government funded science. It’s not too difficult to imagine this happening; and it explained at least in part why the USGS continued to use Parkfield for its earthquake experiments. They needed a guinea pig, a geological lab rat, one that nobody knew or cared too much about; and if we wanted to understand earthquakes and their behavior, we needed to let them conduct their experiments beyond the glare of public scrutiny.

The 2004 Parkfield earthquake might’ve been the most “captured,” mapped, and studied quake ever recorded during the Parkfield Experiment. As such it was probably also one of the most significant earthquakes in the history of seismology and for the future of earthquake prediction; and to my mind it’s at least possible that it may also have been one of the most significant instances of humans directly and measurably impacting the seismic health of our planet. But when I visited six years later few people involved with the USGS wanted to consider this possibility and fewer people in Parkfield even remembered or cared about the quake; and on some level, for the sake of earthquake science and perhaps for the sake of our future survival this was exactly how it had to work. On some level I appreciated the silence, the quiet surface in Parkfield and the peaceful pace of life in the Cholame; and though there was little to see, I found myself returning several more times that summer, a intentional tourist turned loose in the earthquake lab, searching for something big.

***

[1] Snyder also told me, ”We are well satisfied with all the media coverage (local, regional, national & international – print, radio, TV & documentary) we’ve had over the last few years on the Parkfield Earthquake Experiment and the SAFOD Project.  Nothing has changed of late and we’re in the “monitoring phase” for all the data coming in.”

Related Posts:

• Tracking Quakes
• Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
• Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean
• Reminder of the Importance of NASA
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup

But even more impressive is NASA’s ability to get Gloria Steinem and Charlton Heston in the same room. Just a few days after many were disappointed by the update from the Curiosity, Wired shares vintage PSAs that are endearingly genuine reminders of all that Space Technology has done for us.

Related Posts:

• A History of Mars Exploration
• Look Closer
• Independent Astronauts
• Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
• Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean

At a little before midnight on Oct. 20, 2012, a 5.3 magnitude earthquake, centered near King City on the San Andreas Fault, shook hard enough to be felt in Fresno, some 130 miles away. It was the first earthquake felt in Fresno in over 25 years. And I missed the whole thing. Slept right through it. I felt nothing. In fact I only knew about it the next morning thanks in large part to what might be called the “social networking seismometer.” As the quake sent its P-waves and S-waves out, they were echoed by the waves of response on Facebook and Twitter. I logged in when I woke up and tracked the ripples of impact. I could not only pinpoint the time but also the distance, direction, and destruction caused in the immediate aftermath of the quake. Some posts mentioned the shaking while others talked of strange rumbling and crashing sounds that earthquakes often produce. If I’d had more Facebook friends closer to the epicenter in the Salinas Valley I know my status feed would have been markedly different, more dominated by the quake. In all, the networked stream provided an interesting anecdotal record of the quake and I wondered if seismologists pay attention to such real-time stories of the fissure and fallout. I read the accounts from friends and felt a sense of loss or failure. I felt depressed. I’d lived in California for over six years and still hadn’t experienced a quintessential California quake, still hadn’t come close to what Schopenhauer might call the “dynamic sublime,” the encounter with something powerful enough to destroy you. The greater the threat, he believed, the greater the experience of the sublime. I wanted to rewind the night, sit up for a while longer, and feel the surprise and confusion, the unpredictable shaking of the quake, but I knew I’d missed my chance. Something else I noticed in the social seismology of the quake was that some people never felt a thing while others couldn’t miss the movement. It seemed that, on some level, you had to be tuned into the temblor, had to be paying attention, but even then those responses were mediated first through the senses, then memory and intelligence, and finally through language; and I started to wonder if, had I been awake, I would’ve felt the quake at all, if I even had the instincts to understand what was happening or the language to capture it.

2.

On Jan. 9, 2010 Sophie the dog knew something was wrong. She was listening, practicing a kind of instinctual auscultation and she sensed the danger before anyone else had a clue. In the video, you can tell the moment she realizes it. She’s lounging on the newsroom floor all dog-like and calm—the kind of beatific calm that, every time I watched her, made me jealous in a deep an existential way. In the office, file cabinets line one wall and an old computer sits on a desk next to what looks like a microfiche machine. A wall calendar hangs on a pillar in the foreground. You can count about a dozen boxes of files and spot a towering stack of newsprint, several cluttered desks, along with a couple of empty swivel chairs in the background,

At first, there are no humans in sight–only Sophie lying on the floor in the apparently windowless room of the Times-Standard newspaper in Eureka, California. She’s panting and appears relaxed, clearly at home in her environment. She seems to know this place and it’s rhythms. She could be like a favorite coworker and the sort of benevolent presence that makes everyone’s day a little brighter.

In the video you notice, at first, Sophie’s ears relaxed, hanging loose. Then as the first, faster P-wave, or push-wave of a 6.5 magnitude undersea earthquake ripples out from the epicenter several miles beneath the surface along the Mendocino Fault, Sophie’s ears spring up, straight and wide-open, the ends curling down a bit. She points her nose at one spot on the floor and seems to follow the movement of something with her eyes, almost as if she’s tracking an invisible rodent or a ghost. Suddenly she jumps to her feet, and sprints out of the room, out of the picture.

A split-second later the more destructive S-wave hits Eureka with its vertical amplitude and the newsroom walls begin to wiggle and shake, sending papers and boxes toppling. A man appears from the back of the room and walks to a spot not far from where Sophie had been. He stands there for a moment as the walls move around him, looking utterly confused and terrified. It seems to take a moment for his survival instinct to kick in, but he eventually runs out of the room after Sophie. Soon the lights go out and the security camera screen fills with a strange snow of cascading white bugs.

Sophie is not the only one, of course. She’s just the one dog I couldn’t stop watching and thinking about during this time in my life. Dogs are of course both social, pack animals and particularly devoted to their human companions. Many people have reported strange reactions from their pets just before an earthquake hits. They describe barking, howling, and running in circles. It seemed clear that the dogs and other animals were trying to tell us something, trying to warn us, but lacking the language to do so. Dogs can smell cancer, hear your heart arrhythmia, and find lost children. Among the many things they do better than us, some dogs also appeared to sense the seismic shifts in the earth’s tectonic plates.

Some dogs could warn us of the inevitable end or simply teach us how to pay attention to ourselves and to the world. They seemed to feel the rifts rising up from miles beneath our feet as we dumbly waited–or foolishly sought to be shaken. I admit it. I wanted to feel an earthquake, wanted to understand them, to witness the collision of geological time and human time, but I’m not sure I could explain the reasons behind this desire. Perhaps I simply wanted an unmediated experience, one not conditioned by metaphor or memory, an experience less rational and more instinctual, more animal.

3.

When I asked USGS geophysicist, Andy Michael if anyone has studied the connection between animals and earthquake prediction along the San Andreas Fault, he didn’t dismiss me as a crackpot as quickly as I expected. As it turned out, Michael had also seen the YouTube footage of Sophie and thought we could learn something from studying it more closely. He explained that P-waves, or horizontal “push” waves are longer and faster and are the first waves to ripple out from the epicenter of an earthquake. They are shallow and less destructive, sort of like a warning shot. Right behind them, though, moving a little slower, come the S-waves with vertical amplitude, and it’s these that cause most surface destruction or tsunamis during a big quake.

If we think of an earthquake as a car accident, there is often a moment, a split-second long enough to flinch when you can see the impact coming, when you fling your arm out to protect your passenger, jerk the steering wheel, or slam on the brake. It only lasts a fraction of a second, this warning ripple in time and space, and this is sort of like a P-wave coming in shallow and fast, followed quickly, suddenly, violently and, in the case of earthquakes, inevitably by the devastating S-wave impact.

“The dog probably just felt the P-wave,” Michael said, looking over his glasses at me.

Michael had a bit of East Coast intellectualism and the remnants of a New York accent mixed with a cultivated California hippie-cool. He wore sandals and jeans, but he tucked his t-shirt into his jeans. He was a Columbia-trained scientist who played his trombone over sound recordings of earthquakes as part of what he called his “Earthquake Quartet.” I’d listened to his music online and found it difficult to understand. But I’d also listened to the original sound recordings of quakes that Michael used in his musical compositions and found them oddly compelling. They sounded a little like thunder and breaking shale.

Though he’s a hard-core scientist with all the credentials, Michael still pays attention to anecdotal and artistic interpretations of earthquakes; and when I visited him he told me that he’d compared the video of Sophie the dog with real-time seismographic data from the quake. Michael thought he could synchronize the video footage with the data to show where the dog feels the P-wave and then the exact moment a second or two later when the first S-wave hits.

“Watch,” he said, “You can see it. The wall calendar swings out sideways like a pendulum.”

Sophie the dog felt the first push, the flinch, and she jumped and ran before the S-wave hit, shaking everything. I told Michael that I thought this was a pretty impressive display of instinct and intellect and wondered why there weren’t “earthquake dogs” in all buildings threatened by seismic activity. But Michael reminded me that aside from their unreliability (not ALL dogs sense earthquakes) the main problem with using some kind of P-wave monitor or, in my mind, a designated Earthquake Dog, for early earthquake warning is that the gap between P-waves and the more destructive S-waves gets wider the further you move away from the epicenter.

Thus the more advance warning you have from a P-wave monitor, or an earthquake sensing dog like Sophie, the less you need it. Such a monitoring system would only be effective in places where the damage and destruction would be minimal. Closer to the epicenter, those S-waves are coming in so fast behind the P-Waves that there’s often no discernible interval between them, no opportunity for a dog to sense the trembling and save us.

“If dogs could reliably sense earthquakes,” Michael said, “the best the thing to do would be to build a machine that replicates that sensing.”

Another USGS official had told me, “What we do is sort of like meteorology.” And it’s true. Seismologists try to predict the unpredictable. They try to understand the chaotic nature of large-scale systems on this planet, systems that obey different laws of time and probability. Andy Michael was perhaps more blunt in his assessment of the challenges facing seismologists.

“You can see a storm coming. You can evacuate people,” he said, throwing his arms up behind his head. “Probably the best we can do right now with earthquake prediction is give a 10 year window.”

I mentioned a recent news story that narrowed the window down even more and claimed a big quake was due any day now. Maybe tomorrow. Michael quickly dismissed the article as essentially the equivalent of scientific hearsay, one reporter’s overhearing and exaggerating a theoretical conversation between seismologists; but he also explained that the point really was that you could write such a story any day about the San Andreas or any fault zone and it wouldn’t do anyone any good.

Why, I wondered then, do we cling to these predictions of a mythically huge quake happening tomorrow? Why do we think we can see the end coming?

Michael settled into his chair a bit and told me he thought some of our focus on prediction, our desire for answers comes from the unsettling realization that the ground beneath our feet is constantly trembling. Part of it has to do with the ability of a seismic event to affect huge populations of people and to cause destruction to infrastructure—roads, utilities, public transportation, and security—that can’t be absorbed into the economy and can have disastrous long-term consequences.

“But honestly,” he said, “most of it has to do with the inevitability and unpredictability of earthquakes. They’re happening all the time; and though the chances are slim, a big one could actually happen any minute, could have already happened at the San Andreas a few miles away from here,” he said and pointed out his window,  “and we wouldn’t know it yet, wouldn’t know until it hits us.”

We both looked out the window.

“It sounds so existential,” I said.

“It is,” he said, grinning and shoving his glasses up his nose.

In 1985 one hundred and twenty-two thousand households in the seismically active Parkfield, California region received a brochure from the USGS warning them of a quake sometime in the next eight years. I wondered how many people in Parkfield marked 1993 with a special calendar, checking off each day they didn’t feel a big one. How long did that brochure stay tacked to the refrigerator? How long did people wait, living with the possibility of disaster.

I wanted to believe this knowledge of the simultaneous inevitability and unpredictability of disaster could comfort me, that perhaps I could always live in the in-between spaces, the liminal zones between warning and impact.

Listen to Steven read his essay:

Rumpus original art by Annie Daly.

Related Posts:

• Field Trip to the Earthquake Lab, 2010
• Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
• Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean
• Reminder of the Importance of NASA
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup

In L’Aquila, Italy, however, the tables have turned as six scientists and one government official potentially face six years in prison for charges of manslaughter after “lying” to the public about a deadly earthquake in 2006. The scientists say they could not have predicted the earthquake. A likely story, science.

Related Posts:

• A History of Mars Exploration
• Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
• Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean
• Zine Anthologies from Small Presses
• Field Trip to the Earthquake Lab, 2010

“Greg Gage of the DIY neuroscience company Backyard Brains stimulated the axons of a squid with the electrical signals coming out of a headphone jack plugged into an iPhone playing a Cypress Hill song. He videotaped the Squid’s pigmented cells called chromatophores, which changed with the music.”

Related Posts:

• Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
• Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean
• Field Trip to the Earthquake Lab, 2010
• Reminder of the Importance of NASA
• Tracking Quakes

The Guardian has compiled a short history of Mars musing, which highlights scientists’ fascination with the planet. Since their first sightings in the 17th century, scientists argued about the planet’s capability for sustaining life:

“Lowell eventually ‘saw’ and published maps of not only canals but also vastly thick lines of cultivated vegetation, oases and cities, standing out against ‘one vast Sahara’. It was a vision of a drying, dying planet being managed by an advanced civilization.”

Today’s scientists are still just as excited by the planet, as shown by BoingBoing here.

Related Posts:

• Checking In With The Curiosity Rover
• Reminder of the Importance of NASA
• Look Closer
• Independent Astronauts
• Science: Still Confusing, Still Important

Since the NASA-run program began in 1972, Landsat has captured more than three million images of our planet. To look at some particularly stunning photographs taken by the satellite (pictures chosen through Nasa’s ‘Earth as Art’ contest), click here.

(Via Very Short List)

Related Posts:

• Reminder of the Importance of NASA
• A History of Mars Exploration
• Independent Astronauts
• Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
• Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean

> Tonight’s @AllStarGame compells me to Tweet what Baseball looks like through the lens of an astrophysicist…

> In the 1960s, when we still dreamed, we named a dome, a baseball team, and even the artificial turf they played on “Astro”

> If baseball reported averages to 4 decimal places instead of 3, then a three-hundred hitter would be batting “three thousand”

> You can play baseball on the airless Moon, but only if you find a way not to suffocate & if you don’t care about curve balls.

> In Baseball, if a pitch hits you on ball four, you should get to advance to second base.

> Baseball should track extraordinary plays that fielders can bank, and then credit against errors they might later commit.

> Never figured why the Foul Pole is called the Foul Pole when it’s entirely in fair territory. Should be called the Fair Pole.

> .@AllStarGame: Baseball is ideal for talking & tweeting & tracking stats. Only 30-min of actual playing time in a 3-hr game.

> Curious that intent is assigned by announcers when a batter gets a hit. Yet 70% of the time the player can’t get a hit at all

> Does it disturb anyone else that “The Los Angeles Angels” baseball team translates directly to “The The Angels Angels”?

> Slowest pitch in Baseball to reach catcher? 30 mph, thrown at 45-deg angle. Any slower and at any other angle hits the ground.

> About that slow pitch: BugsBunny can throw a slower one. He’s subject instead to Cartoon Laws of Physics http://bit.ly/3v7hcN

> FYI: Laws of physics show that it takes twice as much energy to throw a baseball 100 mph than it does to throw one at 70 mph.

> Hand-stitched balls, rubbing mud, leather mitts, wooden bats, pine tar. Baseball: a game untouched by modern materials.

> Careful observation reveals that players & coaches of 3hr Baseball games spit at least 6-gal (24 liters) of saliva onto field.

Related Posts:

• Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
• Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean
• Field Trip to the Earthquake Lab, 2010
• Reminder of the Importance of NASA
• Tracking Quakes